EVENTS

Meanwhile From The Department of Unsuprising

It turns out that bad cops work well with other bad cops, encouraging misbehavior. Normally, I’d consider that obvious; it seems to be a general rule of organizations.

It is my opinion that organizational dysfunction follows two paths:

Incompetent or corrupt leadership

Poor hiring practices, and leadership that is detached from hiring

In the case of the second, the police unions exist to maintain a separation between internal discipline and hiring. Once a corrupt person gets hired, they tend to prefer to bring in more of their kind. I have seen this happen in two organizations where I’ve worked: my army reserve unit back in 1984, and a software company that managed to hire an entire cadre of programmers who were good at drinking coffee and not much else. “The buck stops here” is the truth, when it comes to hiring practices and bad management: either the managers don’t know who they are hiring, or they do and they just don’t care.

A friend of mine is currently involved in a case regarding a corrupt, incompetent, racist police chief – and it’s exactly the same situation. There are sayings “fish rot from the head” and “one bad apple spoils the barrel” and they’re true about organizations as much as food.

Many of the most egregious examples of police misconduct arise from tightly knit groups of officers like these. That’s no accident. Recently released data from the Chicago police department shows that misconduct spreads from officer to officer like an infectious disease. And the same behavior that leads cops to violate the rules often predicts whether they will participate in a shooting.

In 2009, the Invisible Institute sued the city of Chicago to reveal in-depth information on the complaint histories of selected Chicago police officers. After a drawn-out legal battle, the Invisible Institute prevailed and acquired the complaint histories of all officers since 1988. They then processed, standardized, and augmented that data with information on police shootings, uses of force, and a complete duty roster of all officers. In total, the data covers more than 30,000 officers and almost 23,000 complaints between 2000 and 2018.

Because complaints can list multiple officers at once, it’s possible to determine that more than one cop was present at the scene at the same time. Complaints listing multiple officers link those cops together, and by assembling thousands of officers across tens of thousands of complaints, it’s possible to build a giant social network of police interactions.

The first question that comes to mind is “why a protracted legal battle”? If they didn’t do anything wrong, they’ve got nothing to hide.

That’s a serious question, though. The only reason an organization would try to protect itself from embarrassing exposure would be if the surviving management hierarchy knew about it (or was in on it) and is trying to shorten an investigation. Don’t these people know how to drain a swamp?

About 1,300 of Chicago’s cops fall into clusters of linked police officers who together have been the subject of at least 100 citizen complaints against them. The list of police within this group reads like a Who’s Who of Chicago police misconduct: From Jerome Finnigan, who led a corrupt unit of cops and plotted to kill a fellow officer, to Raymond Piwnicki, who harassed black citizens using racist language. Officers within this group show not only higher rates of complaints, but also participate in more uses of force and even more shootings. On its own, such a pattern could simply mean that these particular officers are more likely to be street cops or assigned to high-crime divisions. But these central officers are also more than five times as likely to figure in an incident that results in a civil payout by the city for misconduct, according to data on lawsuits involving police officers gathered by the Chicago Reporter.

Humans have been doing organizational corruption long enough that, at this point, we ought to be able to walk in and see the danger signs: internal disciplinary processes, lack of oversight, lack of financial and material tracking, opportunities to collude, etc.

It would be fascinating to take the data set and see if there is a correlation between the individuals that get the most complaints, and the failure-rate of their body cameras. Such metrics wouldn’t necessarily predict corruption but, again, if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide. Anyone who has any experience in human organizations and how corruption happens, should be able to take one look at some of these police diocese departments, and hoist a warning flag.

Comments

It’s best to have your own copies of video of events. I’m not sure how long it will be before video editing becomes easy.
I donate to the Innocence Project. I do not believe any more that if you are not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear.

Once a corrupt person gets hired, they tend to prefer to bring in more of their kind.

In a recent Professor Buzzkill podcast on the Black Death his guest suggested that the Black Death may have contributed to the Protestant reformation by increasing corruption in the Catholic Church. The hypothesis was that Priests who actually cared about their parishioners would be much more likely to contract the Plague and die compared to lazy and corrupt priests. The survivors recruited new priests who more like them, accelerating institutional rot.

Oh yikes I hope your friend is OK… There was a roll-over in front of my house and the driver came to my house for help. He was in bad shape: he was perseverating and introduced himself to me about a dozen times, could not keep track of the conversation, and was bleeding from his ear. He did not want me to call the police which actually sounds like an intelligent decision to me. The police showed up anyway, all excited about taking someone to jail. They did not appear to give a shit about this guy’s injuries and kept asking me if he was drunk (which I did not know). To me that was not the important issue: the important issue was he was injured fairly seriously and needed to go the *hospital*, NOT jail. There was no concern about the guy at all as a human being: to the police it was just a thrill to arrest someone. What a bunch of jerks. It’s put me off calling the police, myself. You may as well call up a gang of thugs and expect them to help you.

@ 2 militantagnosticBlack Death may have contributed to the Protestant reformation by increasing corruption in the Catholic Church.

Very, very, faintly, possible but when your casualty rate in Europe or the Middle East was 50% of the population, it sounds unlikely. It was not a case of caring for parishioners,
all you had to do was exist.

The Black Death was not something like the cholera epidemic at Grosse Île during the Famine, where many caregivers died. There, you had to be in contact with the sick. In the Black Death, an apparently totally healthy person or a passing mouse could kill you. Your dog might have the plague, lick your face and kill you.

The plague could be transmitted though the air or by animal vectors. I cannot really see any reason to suspect much or any difference in fatalities here between good and bad clergy.

I think some of it is simply a question of setting a standard of behavior. Once a young cop sees another cop engage in brutality/corruption and either nothing happens or they get exonerated for it (while other cops back them up), that tells them that this sort of thing is acceptable. On the other hand, if a cop who brutalizes suspects gets, at the very least, criticized by peers and superiors, not only is that cop less likely to engage in that activity again, but those who witnessed it will avoid copying them. Unfortunately, it seems that the former is far more prevalent than the latter.

@millitantagnostic #7.

There is a form of Plague (I don’t know what the 3 variants have in common other than a cool name) called Pneumonic Plague that presents as a lung infection. As a result, this form can be spread by the patient coughing up infectious droplets onto another person. It’s the only known form that can be spread from person to person.

@ 7 militantagnostic
I do not have a primary source but I would refer you to:

Plague in its various forms can spread in a number of ways, with pneumonic plague spreading person to person via airborne bacteria and septicaemic plague spreading that way or via bites from vermin such as fleas. Bubonic plague is certainly spread via animal vectors of this kind, so rats and other rodents spreading fleas would definitely have been a major factor in the spread of the pandemic.

You have to admit, th’ nature of th’ job tends to attract a certain sort of people. If anyone wondered what high school bullies do when they grow up, just look at your local cop shop. That’s where they ended up.

You have to admit, th’ nature of th’ job tends to attract a certain sort of people. If anyone wondered what high school bullies do when they grow up, just look at your local cop shop. That’s where they ended up.

Yes, nature of the job as well as its reputation. In other countries cops don’t shoot people and they cannot even get away with beating up suspects. Where I live, the career of a police officer isn’t perceived as the perfect place for the wannabe bully. Instead this is perceived as a perfectly average career without any perks that might be desirable for a bully. I suspect that in countries where cops behave better (well, where they are forced to behave better, because they aren’t allowed to do whatever they want and cannot just police themselves), becoming a cop is no longer perceived as the perfect employment option for high school bullies.

11 WMDKitty — Survivor
Various jobs attract various personality types. There is no real reason that cops need to be bullies but they need to be people who are willing to boss people around at need —settling a domestic dispute, handling a crowd, etc. And they seem to generally respect figures of authority.

Given this sort of thing, it is only too easy for them to slip into being bullies, especially if senior management and civilian oversight is not on the ball.

I do not know about the USA, but most police candidates here in Canada don’t seem to have been the school bully. However any tendency to bullying can be nurtured if the police culture encourages it.

Did you ever notice that most police officers are a bit like hounds? The moment a suspect flees, the police officer pursues, even if the pursuit is meaningless or dangerous.

In Toronto you have Mike McCormack, who has currently escaped from actually paying the fine for his most recent ‘discreditable conduct’ charge by being elected to the Toronto Police Association (a union in all but name) which means he is no longer technically a police officer. Said charge came from abuse of the police databases looking up dirt on the reporter who had penned stories about his previous discreditable conduct charges.

Mike McCormack, a disgrace to the Toronto Police and to the Police Union. I thought McCormack was the president of the union, am I mistaken and the Toronto Police Association is what I thought was the union?

jrkrideau@#13:Did you ever notice that most police officers are a bit like hounds? The moment a suspect flees, the police officer pursues, even if the pursuit is meaningless or dangerous.

Yes. It’s really worrisome, too, since it indicates to me that they do not actually understand their purpose. Their purpose is to protect the innocent and maintain order – it’s not “make sure nobody escapes” or “make sure that nobody talks back to you.” Many of the things that police do ought to be deferred and dealt with later when/if appropriate. But authoritarians got to authority.